Virtue is the link of all perfections, the centre of all the felicities. She it is that makes a man prudent, discreet, sagacious, cautious, wise, courageous, thoughtful, trustworthy, happy, honoured, truthful, and a universal Hero... Virtue alone is serious, all else is but jest. A man's capacity and greatness are to be measured by his virtue and not by his fortune. She alone is all-sufficient. She makes men lovable in life, memorable after death.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The whole book ends here, and it ends by subordinating everything that came before to one thing: character. After two hundred and ninety-nine maxims of shrewdness, timing, reputation, and prudence, the final word is that all of it is hollow without virtue underneath it, because virtue is what links every other excellence together and gives the felicities their centre. It is the thing that actually makes a person wise, trustworthy, courageous, and honoured, rather than merely appearing so; strip it away and the cleverness becomes mere manipulation, impressive and worthless. Fortune and capacity are not the true measure of a person; character is, and it is the one quality fully sufficient on its own. Everything else in the book is a tool, and tools serve whoever holds them; this last maxim insists that what you are is what finally decides whether all the rest was worth anything. The tactics are flexible. This is the part that is not.
Practice
- Put character under everything; the shrewdness of the whole book is hollow, and often harmful, without the virtue that gives it its centre (this is the keystone the other 299 rest on).
- Let what you are decide how you use what you know; the same tactics serve honour or manipulation, and only character settles which.
- Measure yourself by virtue, not by fortune or cleverness; it is the one quality sufficient on its own, and the one that outlasts you.
Use this when
- Use this as the frame for every other maxim in the book; the tools are worth having only in the hands of someone worth being.
- Use it as the final check on any clever move; if it requires you to be less than you should be, the cleverness is not worth it.
Ignore this when
- Don't read this as making the other 299 maxims worthless; prudence and skill matter, they simply must rest on character to be worth anything (the tactics are flexible, the values are not).
- Don't mistake performed virtue for the real thing; the whole point is being it, not seeming it, which is where the book began and where it ends (maxims 297 and 295).
A picture of it
Having spent a career mastering the tactics, timing, reputation, discretion, the reading of people, a leader watches two contemporaries of equal skill end very differently. The tools were the same in both pairs of hands. What differed was the character underneath: the one who used the shrewdness in service of something worth serving is trusted, sought, and remembered, while the equally clever one who used it for himself alone is, in the end, avoided and forgotten. The cunning was identical; the character was not, and the character was what decided which life the cunning added up to. Every tactic in the book, he understands at last, serves whoever holds it, and what you are is the only thing that makes holding them worthwhile.
After everything, be a saint. The tactics serve whoever holds them; only character decides whether the whole of it was worth anything.